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Fallen hero

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

At work, she soon began to feel something wasn’t right.
There was a lot walking back and forth in the office. Other staff members quickly rushed to pick up ringing phones. She thought it strange that the assistant principal refused her offer of help with some files. Odder still was the fact that the principal hadn’t left the school for a scheduled meeting.
At about 10 a.m., she was brought into the principal’s office as others were ushered out.
“She went over to the sink to get a glass of water,” Bohan recalled. “She turned around, and said: ‘Margaret, I have some bad news.'”
Just then, the school secretary realized that they weren’t alone. William Feehan, first deputy commissioner of the Fire Department, and her neighbor Ray Goldbach, a captain in the department, were also there.
When Goldbach had recently moved into their street in Middle Village, Queens, her firefighter son welcomed him to the neighborhood and soon he was working on the captain’s garage roof. He was always helping somebody in some way. The previous day, he had decorated his parents’ home for Christmas, and, atop a ladder, placed a white star outside a second-floor window so his father wouldn’t have do it. Later on, he handed out toys to sick children at Brookdale Hospital not far from his fire house in Canarsie, Brooklyn.
It was Feehan who broke it to her. James Bohan, age 25, and two of his colleagues had been killed fighting a fire before dawn at a seniors’ apartment complex.
Bohan, Lt. Joseph Cavalieri and Firefighter Christopher Bopp, of Ladder Company 170, Engine 257, Battalion 58, died when a fireball engulfed them as they were searching for an elderly woman thought to be trapped in her 10th floor apartment. Bohan had been a firefighter for just two years.
Six other firemen were injured in the blaze that was caused by a dropped cigarette and had rapidly spread because the building’s sprinkler system had been deactivated.
Margaret Bohan’s brother-in-law came to pick her up at work and brought her home. FDNY officials had also informed her older son Maurice, an employee of the city’s housing authority, and were trying to locate her husband John, a telephone company technician.
“I didn’t believe that he was dead,” she recalled. “I said: ‘He’ll turn up.’
“I kept thinking ‘why don’t they take me to see him.'”
The Bohan, Bopp and Cavalieri never got permission to view the bodies.
Margaret Bohan was barely aware that the tragedy had made the three families front-page news for days.
“I didn’t realize what was going on,” she said.
She remembers only a few details of the funeral: coming out of the church on that bright, freezing day, the huge crowd — estimated at 10,000 — the helicopters hovering overhead and her son’s coffin being lifted onto the caisson.
Then came the agony of a Christmas without her younger son, who had been expected that week to formally announce his engagement to Audrey Frlic, his girlfriend of three years.
Speaking at a Queens diner a few weeks ago, Bohan said: “I hate when December comes up, because I know what’s in front of me. But we get through it.”
Margaret Condon grew up an only child in Loughill, Co. Limerick. In 1962, 11 months after her arrival in New York, she met John Bohan, a Mohill, Co. Leitrim immigrant who had just ended a four-year stint in the U.S army. They were married in 1964.
The Bohans eventually formed a big and close extended family in New York, with four of her husband’s five siblings settling in the city. There were eventually 13 first cousins in the next generation of the family, including those in the one overseas branch in Dublin.
When the aunts, uncles and cousins visited, James Bohan “was the heart and soul of the party,” said one of those cousins, John Bohan. At Christmas time, it was James who dressed up as Santa Claus.
“He was so full of fun,” said another cousin Sheila Buchanan. “He was amazing.”
He was a “wild character,” at least in comparison with the rest of the family. “The Bohans are reserved. We’re quiet,” she said.
“He was the best guy you could ever meet,” said fellow firefighter and boyhood friend Roger Rudzewick. “He had a heart of gold. He was the guy you would call at 3 in the morning.”
Rudzewick said he hopes that his first-born child, 10-month old James, grows up to be a man just like his deceased friend.
“He made you feel you were his best friend,” said Buchanan, who also named her first son James. “When he died, we realized just how many best friends he had.”
The extended family gathers each year for the James Bohan Family Christmas Dinner. On last Sunday, 29 adults and 14 children attended this year’s event at Connolly’s in Maspeth, Queens.
Margaret Bohan gave birth to her first son Maurice in 1970, and three years later James was born.
“They were both very good babies,” said their mother.
“James from the very beginning was up to every sort of devilment,” she said. “His grandmother wouldn’t let him out when he was a 4-year-old, because he’d never come back.
“He was very friendly. He was a great kid,” she said.
He began his schooling at St. Margaret’s. His mother remembered a nun calling to say: “Your son is in with the wrong crowd.”
Margaret Bohan laughed.
“He wasn’t. They were all just having fun,” she said.
For years, he was inseparable from his older brother. Maurice Bohan is particularly proud of the James Bohan Rink that was built in his brother’s honor in Juniper Valley Park, which is a block from the family home. There is also a tree there named for him.
“We are very grateful to the community for the rink and for all of their support,” the housing authority official said.
“We grew up playing hockey,” he recalled. “We grew up in the park.”
His brother, he added, liked the Rangers, the Mets and the Jets. And the kid who sometimes dressed up as Elvis had posters of the Who and Led Zepplin on his bedroom walls.
When it came time for college, Maurice went off to Fordham. By the time he was graduating four years later with a degree in business administration, James was at St. John’s University. But he dropped out after a while. He decided to train in carpentry, his father’s craft, and after he qualified he found work with an Irish-owned construction company.
“He loved the whole Irish scene,” remembered his mother. “He loved working with the Irish guys, and they loved him.”
Then Bohan decided to pursue his childhood dream. He and Roger Rudzewick applied to join the Fire Department of New York. Though, they had almost identical results on the initial test, only Rudzewick was contacted at first. Bohan had an anxious three-month wait before he, too, was called.
“He was so thrilled,” Margaret Bohan said. “He never went out during the time he was training at the probie school.”
At the final examinations, though, he stumbled on one part of the EMS test.
“Taking blood pressure. He couldn’t get it right. But the guy said he could take it a couple of days later,” she said.
He told his mother: “I know it. I just froze.”
A few days later the same thing happened. “And the guy said. ‘I don’t know Bohan if you’re going to be able to take it again.’
“He came home on Friday night. He went to bed and never got up until Monday morning,” Margaret Bohan said.
“He said to me ‘Mom, this is the only thing I want.’
“I put a prayer in his hat,” she said. He was allowed take the EMS test a third time. His mother got the promised phone call when he passed it.
“I guess it was meant to be,” she said.
That first Christmas after his death two years later, the “floodgates opened,” she said.
“There was a time for about six months when I couldn’t pray. I couldn’t open my mouth,” she said. “I’m blamed God.”
But every Christmas, every Mother’s Day, every birthday, it gets a little easier, she said.
Bohan gave up her job with the Board of Education. “Nothing seemed important,” she said. She wanted to give back to the community and after consulting with Monsignor Vavaro at St. Margaret’s Church, she volunteered to work for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
“We give to five churches. One of the churches I have is very poor,” she said. “Your heart goes out to them.”
Although just as devout, her husband preferred not to give through church institutions. So the couple gives directly, too, to needy families.
The family also organizes an annual Christmas toy drive, which was started by neighbor Eileen Moloney. On last Monday at the Bohan home, firefighters collected a basement full of gifts that will be distributed to four charities.
The Bohans, however, had long been known amongst friends and neighbors for their generosity and kindness. It was mentioned in the news reports of their son’s death.
“My Uncle John is terrific. He’s one of kind,” said niece Sheila Buchanan.
The Bohan family, which had always been close, got even closer after the tragedy, Buchanan said. They bought a home together in the Catskills, an area that James Bohan loved. (The Juniper Valley Park rink plaque says that at an Irish festival there he once bought up and distributed to children the entire stock at a balloon stand.)
The Bohans have maintained contact with the Cavalieri and Bopp families over the years, but not with their son’s fianc

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